The genre itself was defined as a separate movement from post-punk due to its darker music accompanied by introspective and romantic lyrics. Gothic rock then gave rise to a broader subculture that included clubs, fashion and publications in the 1980s.

In 1976, Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice was published. The main character, although dark, wanted companionship and love. The book, according to music journalist Dave Thompson, slowly created an audience for gothic rock by word of mouth. The same year saw the punk rock band The Damned debut. The group's vocalist Dave Vanian was a former gravedigger who dressed like a vampire. Brian James, a guitarist for the group, noted, "Other groups had safety pins and the spitting and bondage trousers, but you went to a Damned show, and half the local cemetery would be propped up against the stage".[14]

Robert Smith of The Cure in 1989, who was on the front cover of NME Originals: Goth in 2004.[2]

Critic John Stickney used the term "gothic rock" to describe the music of The Doors in October 1967, in a review published in The Williams Record.[15] Stickney wrote that the band met the journalists "in the gloomy vaulted wine cellar of the Delmonico hotel, the perfect room to honor the gothic rock of the Doors".[15] The author noted that contrary to the "pleasant, amusing hippies", there was "violence" in their music and a dark atmosphere on stage during their concerts.[15] The Doors' lyrics and their "audience-antagonizing performances" have even been seen as the beginning of gothic rock.[16]

In the late 1970s, the word "gothic" was used to describe the atmosphere of post-punk bands like Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Magazine. In March 1979, critic Nick Kent used the gothic adjective in his review of Magazine's second album Secondhand Daylight. Kent noted that there was "a new austere sense of authority" to their music, with a "dank neo-Gothic sound".[17] Later that year, Martin Hannett described Joy Division as "dancing music with gothic overtones"[18] and in September, their manager Tony Wilson described their music as "gothic" on the television show Something Else.[19] In 1980, Melody Maker wrote that "Joy Division are masters of this gothic gloom".[20] When their final album Closer came out a couple of months after the death of their singer, Sounds noted in its review that there were "dark strokes of gothic rock".[21]

Not long after, this appellation "became a critical term of abuse" for a band like Bauhaus, who had arrived on the music scene in 1979.[18] However, the term would not be adopted as "positive identity, a tribal rallying cry" until a shift in the scene in 1982.[18] In addition, Simon Reynolds identified The Birthday Party and Killing Joke as essential proto-goth groups.[22] Despite their legacy as progenitors of gothic rock, those groups disliked the label.[23]Adam Ant's early work was also a major impetus for the gothic rock scene, and much of the fan base came from his milieu.[24] Other early contributors to the scene included Ireland's The Virgin Prunes and UK Decay.

Bauhaus's debut single, "Bela Lugosi's Dead", released in late 1979, was retrospectively considered to be the beginning of the gothic rock genre.[25] According to Peter Murphy, the song was written to be tongue-in-cheek, but since the group performed it with "naive seriousness", that is how the audience understood it.[14]

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In the early 1980s, post-punk bands such as Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure included more gothic characteristics in their music.[13] According to Reynolds, with their fourth album, 1981's Juju, the Banshees introduced several gothic qualities, lyrically and sonically,[27] whereas according The Guardian, Juju was art rock on certain album tracks and pop on the singles.[28] Their bassist Steven Severin attributed the aesthetic used by the Banshees around that time to the influence of The Cramps.[13] The Cure's "oppressively dispirited" trio of albums, Seventeen Seconds (1980), Faith (1981) and Pornography (1982), cemented that group's stature in the genre.[29] The line "It doesn't matter if we all die" began the Pornography album, which is considered as "The Cure's gothic piece de resistance".[30] They would later become the most commercially successful of these groups.[31] The Cure's style was "withdrawn",[29] contrasting with their contemporaries like Nick Cave's first band The Birthday Party, who drew on blues and spastic, violent turmoil.[32] With The Birthday Party's Junkyard album, Nick Cave combined "sacred and profane" things, using old testament imagery with stories about sin, curses and damnation.[33] Their 1981 single "Release the Bats" was particularly influential in the scene.[33]

Killing Joke were originally inspired by Public Image Ltd., borrowing from funk, disco, dub and, later, heavy metal.[34] Calling their style "tension music", Killing Joke distorted these elements to provocative effect, as well as producing a morbid, politically charged visual style.[34] The Damned moved beyond their original punk sound, inflecting 1980's The Black Album with dramatic surges and crooned vocals.[35]

In February 1983, the emerging scene was described as "positive punk" on the front cover of the NME:[9] in his article, journalist Richard North described Bauhaus and Theatre of Hate as "the immediate forerunners of today's flood", and declared, "So here it is: the new positive punk, with no empty promises of revolution, either in the rock'n'roll sense or the wider political sphere. Here is only a chance of self awareness, of personal revolution, of colourful perception and galvanisation of the imagination that startles the slumbering mind and body from their sloth".[9] That year, myriad goth groups emerged, including Flesh for Lulu, Play Dead, Rubella Ballet, Gene Loves Jezebel, Blood and Roses, and Ausgang.[40] The 4AD label released music in a more ethereal style, by groups such as Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance and Xmal Deutschland.[40] The Icelandic group Kukl also appeared in this period, which included Björk and other musicians who later participated in The Sugarcubes.[40]

Simon Reynolds speaks of a shift from early goth to gothic rock proper, advanced by The Sisters of Mercy.[41] As journalist Jennifer Park puts it, "the original blueprint for gothic rock had mutated significantly. Doom and gloom was no longer confined to its characteristic atmospherics, but as the Sisters demonstrated, it could really rock".[42] The Sisters of Mercy, who cited as influences Leonard Cohen, Gary Glitter, Motörhead, The Stooges, The Velvet Underground, The Birthday Party, Suicide and The Fall, created a new, harder form of gothic rock.[43] In addition, they incorporated a drum machine.[43] Reynolds identifies their 1983 single "Temple of Love" as the quintessential goth anthem of the year, along with Southern Death Cult's "Fatman".[44] The group created their own record label, Merciful Release, which also signed The March Violets, who performed in a similar style.[45] According to Simon Reynolds, The March Violets "imitated Joy Division sonically".[46] Another band, The Danse Society was particularly inspired by The Cure in their Pornography period.[45]

In the 2000s, critics regularly noticed the influence of goth on new bands.[53][54] English band The Horrors mixed 1960s garage rock with 1980s goth.[53] When referencing female singer Zola Jesus, writers questioned if she announced the second coming of the genre[55] as her music was described with this term.[56]

In terms of fashion, gothic bands incorporated influences from 19th-century Gothic literature along with horror films and, to a lesser extent, the BDSM culture.[57]Gothic fashions within the subculture range from deathrock, punk, androgynous, Victorian, some Renaissance and medieval-style attire, or combinations of the above, most often with black clothing, makeup and hair.[58] Gothic singers used to crimp their hair in the 1980s.[59]

^Rambali, Paul (July 1983). "A Rare Glimpse into a Private World". The Face. Curtis' death wrapped an already mysterious group in legend. From the press eulogies, you would think Curtis had gone to join Chatterton, Rimbaud and Morrison in the hallowed hall of premature harvests. To a group with several strong gothic characteristics was added a further piece of romance. The rock press had lost its great white hope, but they had lost a friend. It must have made bitter reading.

^"Something Else [featuring Joy Division]". BBC television [archive added on youtube]. 15 September 1979. Because it is unsettling, it is like sinister and gothic, it won't be played. [interview of Joy Division's manager Tony Wilson next to Joy Division's drummer Stephen Morris from 3:31]

^Bohn, Chris (16 February 1980). "Joy Division: University of London Union – Live Review". Melody Maker.

^McCullough, Dave (26 July 1980). "Closer to the Edge". Sounds. Young men in dark silhouettes, some darker than others, looking inwards, looking out, discovering the same horror and describing it with the same dark strokes of gothic rock.

^Price, Simon (1999). "7. The Holy Bible". Everything (A Book About Manic Street Preachers). Virgin Books. p. 143. In mood as much as message, The Holy Bible was an intensely sombre record, overcast by the same stormy skies which darkened Van Gogh's last works. It was gothic and, quite often, literally goth: more than one song could easily have been early Cure, Sisters of Mercy or Bauhaus.